This, of course, makes SEO that much more of a concern – and priority.

There may not be a magic bullet but there is something powerful enough on its own to generate more traffic and leads to your site. This one thing is the Superman of SEO, giving you better all-around SEO – and feeding your business a steady stream of potential customers.

The Power of Content

The internet is built upon content. Without content, there would be no internet, no websites to index and no search engines. And with more people online today than ever before, the thirst for content seems to be unquenchable.

With this amazing amount of content being created by people all over the world, Search Engines have to keep up. If they don’t, they’ll get eclipsed by those who can keep up and can deliver to people the content they want to see.

As a business, you’re in a unique position to connect with your audience directly, build your SEO presence, and develop a lucrative channel for your customers to flow all in one fell swoop.

Done properly, content can become one of your best means of advertising and one that can far out-shine the cost and benefits of conventional advertising.

Investing in Content Creation

You might be wondering “Well, how can I make this work for my business?”.

The first thing to understand is that producing content takes time. Long gone are the days where you can slap up a 300-500-word diary entry about your day and expect considerable blogging success. The standard for quality content has gone up and with that, the amount of time it takes to create quality content has also increased. Expect the time investment to be in the ballpark of 6, to 10, to 20 hours – to multiple days – for a single piece of content!

That may or may not seem like a lot to you but when you’ve got a business to run and other life responsibilities, 20 hours is a pretty significant chunk of time.

The internet is a crowded place and competition is fierce so you’ve got to invest in the process and create quality content that people will want to read. In other words, for this to work you need to provide something of recognizable value, the type of content that people will want to engage with, share, or invest in.

Choosing Your Topics Wisely

The next thing you need to nail down is what you’re writing about.

There’s a new term being thrown around these days known as “user intent”. Especially since Voice Search has gained an incredible dominance in technology; search engines are trying to understand what people mean when they search for something.

For example, if someone searches “Star Wars” it’s very hard to discern what the intent behind their search is, beyond an apparent interested in Star Wars. However, if someone searches “Star Wars tickets”, we can discern that they are looking for tickets to the Star Wars movie. The more we understand the what behind a user’s search, the better able are we to craft content that speaks directly to that intent.

User intent should have a direct impact on how you produce your content. Figuring out the intent behind what someone is searching is a mix of SEO and understanding your market. The trick is to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and try to figure out what they’re searching online. You know what your business does best, so what would someone looking for you search for when they go online?

That will give you a jumping off point from which to build a content and SEO strategy. Armed with that and refined through the process of keyword research and other optimization strategies, you can now confidently begin creating content.

Types of Content

Content doesn’t just have to be in word-format. If you can dream it, you can do it.

However, FYI, videos are hugely popular and one of the best ways to transmit your business’s message. People tend to watch videos more readily than read an article (source).

There really are no rules about which type of content you should use, and ultimately, it should boil down to what makes the most sense for your business. Cost and time is another concern but historically, there’s never been a cheaper time in history to produce online content so that’s gotta be worth something!

Images and infographics are also gaining a lot of popularity as they are effective in laying out a collection of information in a fun and engaging way. Infographics are also great fodder for gaining popularity among your industry and can really be a shot-in-the-arm for your SEO as people love linking to infographics!

Regardless of the type of content your produce, the thing that will really take things to the next level is consistency.

Scheduling for Consistency

Imagine your website as a wood-burning fire. To keep the fire burning, you have to feed it logs. If you stop putting logs in the fire, it will eventually go out.

This same thing applies to creating content for your website. If you consistently put new articles and new content on your website, you will continue to see and maintain a steady flow of website traffic. If you stop producing content for your site, eventually, that flow of traffic will dwindle and burn out.

Producing content consistently ensures a continuous stream of visitors to your site (assuming you are promoting your content once you’ve got it). Over time, and with the right strategy, you will have amassed a readership of regular site visitors who can later turn into customers and/or ambassadors for your brand.

Don’t worry: once you’ve reached a certain critical mass, it will become less important to maintain a strict content schedule and you won’t have to knock yourself creating content but in the early days, you’ve gotta keep stoking the fire!

The SEO Benefits of Content Creation

In terms of SEO, content is the golden goose that lays the egg. In other words, and this goes back to what I said before, without content, you’ve got nothing.

Content is the vehicle in which your keywords are delivered. As you produce content around your core keywords, that content gets indexed by search engines and before you know it, you’re cornering the market on a handful of targeted keywords that speak directly to your target audience.

The more quality content that you produce, the more opportunities you create to improve your SEO standing online. Examples of these SEO-boosting opportunities could be people sharing your content, other websites linking to it, or plain and simple brand awareness which can turn into sales down the road. All of these things have hugely positive effects on your SEO and your overall business success.

What’s more is that by creating content around your niche, you position yourself as an industry authority. As the quality of your SEO rises, you will gain more and more favor with search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing and will rank higher for the keywords that matter most to your business.

Conclusion

By now, it should be pretty clear the importance and remarkable business benefits that can come from a commitment to a regular content strategy.

From a purely SEO perspective, it is one of the most effective and sure-fire ways to elevate your web presence and exposure in search engines as it attracts more links and grows your presence online. On a business success level, it works to grow your business by proactively engaging your target market and building trust, relationships, and brand awareness with the people who matter most. In my opinion, there is no substitute for a careful and strategic content strategy.

However, like anything worth doing, it takes some serious time and energy and unfortunately, that’s just not in the cards for every business owner.

If this is you and you can see the benefits of producing regular content but don’t feel you are able or willing to devote the time and resources necessary to producing regular, quality content, Peak Websites can help. We have over 5000+ North American-based English-speaking writers who collectively cover a huge range of industry topics and subjects. From blog articles to infographics, videos and more, we assist and can launch a content creation strategy that is tailored to your business and your goals.

Great points you’re offering here. As one of the top 3 pillars of a sound SEO Strategy (besides keywords and links), Content remains top priority for developing an ongoing way to get more web visitors to your site. User intent is becoming more important, as well as dwell time (while at the site), as search engines continue to find new and better ways to serve the right search results to the users. It will be interesting to see how voice search affects SEO, for sure!